Murder at the Birch Tree Theater

I enjoyed this. It has the same mechanics as several other mystery/investigation games I've played, where you simply click on highlighted things within a scene, and 'collect' all the words you can find, and then use these to fill out a solution. I liked this better than some of the others I played, though. It can be tricky to choose the correct words in some cases, especially in a very long solution, but it's not a terribly difficult game overall. Still, I enjoyed it, and I think the story was more interesting than the other, similar games I played. It was nice that at times there were things that required figuring out to be able to find/open, so it took a little more work to collect some of the words. It was neat to see the theater after each jump in time, and see what madness happened this time. ;)

A very fun Golden Idol-like, with some slightly different mechanics and a very engrossing overall story. Definitely more fun if you know things about theater or have ever had the (mis)fortune to be involved in community theater. Some stuff can be a little bit buggy (for example, sometimes if you don't drag the words to precisely the right place, they won't stick) but it's definitely worth your time if you enjoy mysteries of this type or like theater! I found the characters much more engrossing and relatable than in other similar games. (Also, for the record, I do not think that the game romanticizes harassment. I'm sorry that another reviewer had a negative experience with the credits, but it feels like they were projecting their own interpretation and assuming that was what the game designer intended and what everyone else would experience. If you're on the fence because of that, note that the game does have harassment/stalking in it, but it requires a very particular set of assumptions to believe that the ending is positive about it.)